ode is known whereby the properties of life
can be communicated to dead matter. All the experiments hitherto made,
and very eminently those recently performed by Pasteur, Tyndall, and
Dallinger, lead to the conclusion that even the simplest living beings
can be produced only from germs originating in previously living
organisms of similar structure. The simplest living organisms are
thus to science ultimate facts, for which it can not account except
conjecturally.

3. No case is certainly known in human experience where any species of
animal or plant has been so changed as to assume all the characters of
a new species. Species are thus practically to science unchangeable
units, the origin of which we have as yet no means of tracing.

4. Though the general history of animal life in time bears a certain
resemblance to the development of the individual animal from the
embryo, there is no reason whatever to believe that this is more than
a mere relation of analogy, arising from the fact that in both cases
the law of procedure is to pass from the simpler forms to the more
complex, and from the more generalized to the more specialized. The
external conditions and details of the two kinds of series are
altogether different, and become more so the more they are
investigated. This shows that the causes can not have been similar.

5. In tracing back animals and groups of animals in geological time,
we find that they always end without any link of connection with
previous beings, and in circumstances which render any such
connections improbable. In the work of our next creative day, the
series of animals preceding the modern horse has been cited as a good
instance of probable evolution; but not only are the members of the
series so widely separated in space and time that no connection can be
traced, but the earliest of them, the _Orohippus_, would require, on
the theory, to have been preceded by a previous series extending so
far back that it is impossible, under any supposition of the
imperfection of our present knowledge, to consider such extension
probable. The same difficulty applies to every case of tracing back
any specific form either of animal or plant. This general result
proves, as I have elsewhere attempted to show,[97] that the
introduction of the various animal types must have been abrupt, and
under some influence quite different from that of evolution.

These are what I would term the five fatal objections to evo